Spielberg speaks

Here's the video of Steven Spielberg's Harvard commencement speech.   Confirms all of my positive assessments of him, except for his choice of shoes when wearing a suit.  (Maybe he has foot issues?)



Update:  didn't mention - his 99 year old Dad is in the audience. 

How to raise tax revenue, sensibly

We're Going to Need More Tax Revenue. Here's How to Raise It.

Found this via Peter Whiteford's twitter feed.  He really strikes me as one of the most sensible economic/social commentators around.

Anyway, although it is about the American tax system, it seems that most of the recommendations translate well to Australia.

Watch an astronaut trying to make himself sick

Pretty good video from that British astronaut Tim Peake up in ISS:

Rather unfortunate discovery for the mice concerned

First rodent found with a human-like menstrual cycle : Nature News & Comment

Mice are a mainstay of biomedical research laboratories. But the rodents are poor models for studying women’s reproductive health, because they don’t menstruate.

Now
researchers at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, say that they
have found a rodent that defies this conventional wisdom: the spiny
mouse (Acomys cahirinus). If the finding holds up, the animal could one day be used to research women's menstruation-related health conditions.

She's such a radical

Hilary Clinton, as quoted at Breitbart (!) sounds such a radical on gun control [/sarc]:

During an interview with the Today Show, she added, “Let’s keep weapons of war off our streets like the one that was used in Orlando.”
Clinton criticized Florida’s gun laws, blaming legislatures for not regulating assault weapons, 50 caliber rifles, or large capacity ammunition magazines. She also blamed Florida for not requiring a permit to purchase a gun, not requiring gun registration, and not requiring gun owners to be licensed to carry a shotgun or a rifle.
“We know the gunman used a weapon of war to shoot down at least 50 innocent Americans and, you know, we won’t even be able to get the congress to prevent terrorists or people on the no-fly list from buying guns,” she said.
Clinton demanded more gun control to stop mass shootings, reminding viewers that the mass shooting in Orlando was the worst in American history.
“Yes, there is a right for law-abiding, responsible Americans to own guns and, yes, there are reasonable common sense measures to try to keep people safe from guns,” she said. “We have to figure out the best way to move forward on that. That’s what I’m committed to doing.”
Clinton condemned gun rights groups after they “scared the heck out of voting officials” on gun control.
“We cannot fall into the trap set by the gun lobby that says if you can’t stop every shooting and every incident, you should not try to stop any,” she said. “That is not how laws work. it’s not common sense.”

Trump panders to the paranoid Right - no surprise

Donald Trump Implies President Obama Was Involved in the Orlando Shooting - The Atlantic

Good article on the 2nd Amendment

How the NRA perverted the meaning of the 2nd Amendment.

Stupid man halves his readership

One odd outcome of the Orlando shootings is that Jim Hoft, (the "stupidest man on the internet", as Little Green Footballs like to call him, with good justification) has come out as a gay Republican.   On Breitbart, no less, with several thousands of comments following.   (Can't be bothered fighting my way through them, although I'm sure some must be interesting reading.)

Nutty conservative Catholic CL over at Catallaxy has been linking to Hoft's Gateway Pundit posts for years.  CL's startling contribution to Catallaxy reaction to the shootings was this:

Let us not forget that Islam is 100 percent correct about such things as gay ‘marriage’ and adoption. 100 percent correct. The gay lobby poses a far bigger threat to civilisation than ISIS.

Leyonhjelm can't resist

So, (hopefully soon to be ex-) Senator Leyonhjelm couldn't hold it back any longer - tweeting the solution to gun massacres in gay nightclubs is for gays to be armed.   Because, yeah, a flurry of bullets from pistols as well as the spray from a rapidly firing AR15 in a semi dark nightclub full of a few hundred dancers is a better solution than - not letting nutters (Islamic or otherwise) getting their hands on a AR15. Not to mention the fact that Florida already has concealed weapon licences, although bars are apparently "gun free zones" by law.*

 What a "guns cure everything" moron.


*  Of course, the appalling gun nutters believe this is unfair.   If Leyonhjelm thinks people going out to a bar or nightclub would feel safer by knowing some patrons are probably carrying a concealed carry pistol, then he should say so; and the rest of Australia can laugh at his face.

Trump and terrorism

Without taking away from the personal tragedies in Orlando, the bigger picture everyone will be thinking about is the extent to which Trump may benefit out of Islamic inspired terrorism (whether or not the killer  appears - like in Sydney's Lindt cafe siege - to be a generic violent nutter from way back, as well as an IS fanboy.)

While Trump fans will think he has already benefited (there is a line already popular with the gormless Right at Catallaxy that "Trump was right",) and there will probably be a hundred pieces of panicky commentary about this is how America slides into becoming a Trumpian fascist nation, I think that in all likelihood, Trump will overreach; and when pressed for details, will not come up with a response that is legally, or even morally, credible.  In fact, with his statement, sensible people (I know:  that's not Trump supporters) will already see overreach.

This is what those who are appalled with Trump need to do - demand he get specific with Constitutional responses that make sense.    Not let him waffle on with his generic loudmouth demands and thought bubbles.  

Update:  when will someone ask Trump about his position on this story from 2015? :

Senate Republicans rejected a bill that aims to stop suspected terrorists from legally buying guns, on Thursday.  The vote came a day after at least 14 people were killed during the San Bernardino massacre in California by two suspects, including a woman said to have pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Forty-five senators voted for the bill and 54 voted against it. One Democrat, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and one Republican, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, crossed party lines.
The measure would have denied people on the terrorist watch list the ability to buy guns.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who sponsored the legislation, argued that former President George W. Bush initially proposed the legislation in 2007, and the Obama administration also supports it.

 Update 2:  more on the general nuttiness of the killer.  Still able to buy an assault rifle, though. 

Madness loves company

United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers - The New York Times

A fascinating article here about how the internet is letting the paranoid find and support each other - and reinforce their mad theories.  (I have never heard of the "T.I." - Targetted Individuals - community before.  It's pretty sad.) 

Another in the series - Untopical Movie Reviews

After recently buying a cheap Blu-ray of the Coen brothers' 2010 version of True Grit, I watched it last weekend.

It was well reviewed when released, and there is much to like about it.   First and foremost - it's a fantastic looking film.   Just gorgeous on Blu-ray, and the town where it starts looks extremely authentic in a way most Western settings struggle to.   [It turns out there's a good reason for that - in the fascinating short Extra feature about the film's production design*, the setting is shown as a street in a real Texas town that had facades built in front of some buildings that were too modern, some period alterations to others, and truckloads of dirt emptied on the paving to make it look like the right era.  It's really awesome, sometimes, to see the effort large scale movie making can go to.  And it was great to realise that my perception of authenticity was justified, and that I hadn't been fooled by a green screened background.] 

Secondly, the Coens are great with loquacious characters in period pieces.   We know, from Ken Burn's The Civil War how eloquent even working class men and women  from this period could be, and the Coens showed a similar flare for such dialogue in Oh Brother Where Art Thou?**  Mind you, I am not at all sure how much of the dialogue is lifted from the novel.  I take it from another extra feature that this movie is probably closer to the novel than the John Wayne version.

Thirdly - well, actually, there is no thirdly.   Here I have to move on to a couple of issues I had with it.

Number 1 on the downside:  Jeff Bridges being allowed to growl his way through scores of pages of dialogue.  I've never been a huge fan of his; he always strikes me as a bit of a B actor who has been out of his league in A movies.  But really, in this film, his line delivery was too often too much of a challenge to follow:  it was rough and gravely to the point of being hard to understand.   And it makes the plot of the film (in terms of his background story) too difficult to follow.

I also think the film has a bit of a structural problem.  Look, I can barely remember the John Wayne version (I probably saw it on TV in the late 1970's), and certainly was never a Wayne fan; but I do remember thinking that the climatic scene (the horseback confrontation with the four outlaws) was effective, and felt iconic as soon as you saw it.

But the same scene in this re-make plays flat, for some reason.  Perhaps because the preamble is poorly set up - there's some "past" between the two main antagonists, but it was lost in the thickly accented shouting at each other before the charge begins.    I also think it may be that the scene just seems to spring up too suddenly.  I would have to watch the movie again (and I almost certainly will) to work out why this climax seems poorly handled, compared to the cheesier John Wayne version, but I think it is.

That said, there are other sequences and images that do work very well (for example, it's an extremely realistic looking hanging sequence that startles by not pulling back from the actual violence of the act).   And  apart from Bridges, the actors are all quite fine.  (Even Matt Damon, who I often find oddly unconvincing.)

So I enjoyed it very much as a "nearly great, but flawed in interesting ways" sort of experience.  Recommended.  


*  You can see a shorter version of it on Youtube.

** Production design was great  in that one too - along with Spielberg, they seem to care about production design to an extremely pleasing degree.

Remembering a parody

How the Gremlins 2 Creators Feel About Their Donald Trump Parody Now | WIRED

Yes, I was wondering if anyone recalled the Trump like character in Gremlins 2 - which I thought was a much better (and much funnier) movie than the original.   

Trump gets the Roseanne Barr endorsement he so richly deserves

It's probably not worth reading, but here you go.

Amanda on Adams

Dilbert has gone fascist: The strange unrequited love Scott Adams seems to have for Donald Trump - Salon.com

I haven't fully followed the weird Scott Adams hearts (but does not endorse) Trump saga, but Amanda Marcotte seems to have.    And I suspect her analysis may be close to the truth.   (Although she doesn't consider my theory - that Adams will later claim that he managed to fool everyone with his own powerful mind control techniques.)

This never works

Public servants told it's Armidale or find new jobs

It could be that the audience at Q&A this week was not representative of the electorate (of course it wasn't, some will say), but I did get the impression from it that Barnaby  Joyce could be in real trouble.  It would be a very bad look for a narrowly returned Turnbull government to have lost its Deputy PM.

In fact, this whole election campaign is a bit weird.   It seems we keep hearing mainly about Liberal seats that are in trouble for various reasons; the Greens are probably more electable than ever before with their relatively moderate sounding leader; and Malcolm came across to me as a bit desperate to change his image with his "me and my Dad" video - which I haven't yet watched;  yet the betting market (based, presumably, on some internal polling stuff we don't know) seems thoroughly convinced of a comfortable Coalition win.

A documentary getting strong reviews

De Palma Reviews - Metacritic

I guess it'll be on SBS soon enough.

I like quite a few De Palma films, but his peak must surely be The Untouchables.   (And, hey, I just Googled the movie, and up came a link to a 3/5 star review by Ebert, who apparently complained about de Palma's "curiously lead-footed direction" (!!)   I knew there was a reason I never could trust Ebert's reviews - he was sometimes right, but at other times so off the mark I didn't really bother regularly following him.)

Sequel-itis discussed

Hollywood Has a Big Millennial Problem - The Atlantic

Not sure I've learnt much new from this article, but sure, everyone recognises there is too much money going into too many sequels.  Even if I did like the Star Wars, Bond, Mission Impossible and Jurassic movies of last year.  Sorry...

Republicans on the nose

Just How Bad an Election Night Was It for California Republicans? - The New York Times

The political problem of climate change

It would be funny if it were not worrying, but this post at Real Climate shows how the American Right (and a large slab of ours) likes to "double down" when their beliefs on climate change are challenged:

My study asked the question: “how do Republican individuals perceive persuasive information on climate change action, and what types of information are more or less effective?” To answer this question, I conducted a survey experiment wherein respondents in the treatment conditions were asked to read a paragraph about climate change. Each paragraph linked climate change to a prominent concept in American politics (either free markets, national security, poverty alleviation, or natural disaster preparation), attributed the message to a fictional but realistic-sounding source (either a Republican former Congressman or Democrat), and ended with a call for public action on the issue. These passages were rigorously pretested to ensure realism and impact.

The experiment, conducted in March 2014, used a nationally representative sample of 478 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, who were randomly sorted into one of the eight treatment groups or the control group, where respondents were asked in a single sentence to consider climate change as a political issue. Afterwards, all respondents were asked a series of questions to assess their support for or opposition to governmental action against climate change, their likelihood of taking personal action on the issue, and how sure they felt about their climate change opinions.

What I found was that every single treatment condition failed to convince respondents. In fact, treating Republicans with persuasive information made them more resistant to climate action regardless of the content or sourcing of that information. Overall, simply being exposed to pro-climate action communication appeared to polarize Republicans even further; they became more opposed to governmental action and less likely to take personal action compared to the control group. They also became more certain of their negative opinions on the issue, displaying significantly lower attitudinal ambivalence compared to the control group. What’s more, all of these treatment effects doubled to tripled in size for respondents who reported high personal interest in politics, all statistically significant outcomes. These highly politically interested individuals make up roughly one-third of Republicans in the sample and in the United States.

 If you ask me, a large part of the problem is due to Republican leadership:   if you had the leaders of the party actually prepared to tell their supporters that, sorry, they are wrong on this, in the same way that anti-vaxxers are wrong and hold beliefs supported by only a handful of contrarians whose policy views are against the public interest, you may start to get some marginalisation of the denialists at least underway.  Who is going to be the first high profile Republican leader to take such a position?

It's the current leadership, pandering to their nutty support base, that prevents any movement.  But why should I expect any different?   It is a party full of people ideologically devoted to cutting taxes, no matter what the circumstances, as the economic cure all, listening to just one set of evidence resistant economists. 

When will the Party come back to its senses?